Posts Tagged ‘Cardinal Walter Kasper’

The Swiss Bishop Kurt Koch is going to replace Cardinal Walter Kasper at the head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Diocese of Basel has just confirmed, according to the Neue Zuericher Zeitung.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the genial Schwabian who leads the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, passed the retirement age for Curial department leaders, two years ago. He turns 77 this year. It is interesting to note that the names doing the rounds in Vaticanista gossip are mostly from German-speaking countries.

Senior Vatican watcher Andrea Tornielli has mentioned Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller of Regensburg as well as the Bishop of Basel Kurt Koch who had an audience with the Holy Father on Saturday.

+Mueller, from Mainz, is a professional ecumenist and the President of the Commission for Ecumenical Relations of the German Bishops’ Conference. His doctoral thesis was on the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and entitled “The Church and Sacraments in Religionless Christendom. Bonhoeffer’s Contribution to an Ecumenical Sacrament Theology”. He served as professor of Dogmatic Theology at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University and still holds an honorary professorship there.

Even the people who worked on the book were “positively surprised at how much has been accomplished in these years. It is a very rich harvest that overcomes the polemics and the great historical problems of the Reformation”, the cardinal said.

He said that although there had been great progress, there were some “even among some members of the curia” who held a less than positive view of ecumenism. They believe, he said, that ecumenism “has not borne any fruit and left us with our hands empty.”